Testimony began Thursday in the trial of a Helotes man who has been accused three times over the past four years of holding different women captive.

Aaron T. Alvarez, 25, denied that he violently raped in November 2009 a woman he was meeting in person for the first time after contacting her through a phone chat line days earlier.

“She got into his truck at approximately 2 a.m. — not a time you go get dinner,” defense attorney Scott Simpson said during opening statements. The accuser “intended to hook up with Aaron Alvarez that night, and that's what she did.”

Alvarez could face up to life in prison if jurors in the 379th state District Court find him guilty of aggravated sexual assault. The group has not been told about charges of aggravated kidnapping that are pending in two other cases.

The current accuser said she agreed to meet Alvarez, whom she knew through the chat line as “Ace,” after a long day of waiting tables at her parents' Mexican restaurant.

Alvarez claimed to be a rapper and had offered to show her his studio, the woman, 26, told jurors. The plan was to “chill” at the studio, she said, explaining that she told him upfront she was interested only in friendship.

When she realized she had instead been taken to a “dirty, nasty bedroom” at his home, she asked him to take her home and he refused, she told jurors. He was much bigger than her 5-foot-1 frame and claimed to have a “bazooka” — slang she understood to mean a handgun — in the room, she said.

“I told him 'no' and I kept pulling away, but he kept pulling me back,” she said through tears. “I'm thinking I'm going to die. I'm thinking I'm not going to walk out of that house.”

The woman said she was held captive and repeatedly raped throughout the night. She persuaded him to call for an ambulance the next morning after beginning to vomit and hyperventilate in his room, she said.

A DNA swab of the defendant's genitals shows conclusively that the two engaged in sexual acts, and injuries to the accuser's genitals shows that it wasn't consensual, prosecutors Lorina Rummel and Jan Ischy suggested during opening statements.

“All she wanted to do was meet new people ... using social media,” Rummel said, explaining that instead the accuser was subjected to “her worst nightmare.”